


pass through life at my side

by silkspectred



Category: Avengers (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers Vol. 8 (2018), Birthday, Blow Jobs, Floor Sex, Getting Back Together, M/M, Mild Blood, POV Alternating, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-15 21:49:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14798582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkspectred/pseuds/silkspectred
Summary: Tony’s birthday feels like a new beginning in so many ways. Steve is back from his worst nightmare, Tony is back from his coma. They’re rebuilding the team.It feels good to be back.





	pass through life at my side

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first 616 stevetony fic so... deep breaths.
> 
> Thanks to [cptxrogers](http://cptxrogers.tumblr.com/), [tones](https://twitter.com/ironmantrilogy), and [616tonystark](https://616tonystark.tumblr.com/) for beta.

Steve arrives early on purpose. MJ sends him down to Tony’s lab, so he doesn’t get in the way of the catering people still setting up the buffet.

The box in Steve’s hand provides him with more comfort than its little size should justify. He’s grateful for it; in certain situations he never knows what to do with his hands.

Situations like this one.

Tony’s birthday feels like a new beginning in so many ways. Steve is back from his worst nightmare, Tony is back from his coma. They’re rebuilding the team.

It feels good to be back.

Steve releases his hold on the little box. It drops to the bottom of his pocket.

In the lab, Tony is tinkering. Steve can always tell when he’s really working on something, deeply focused on a project, and when he isn’t. Right now he’s not idle, and the work isn’t mindless or useless, of course, but it doesn’t look like Tony has any specific task to bring to completion. He’s just doing a bit of this and a bit of that, and in the end all those bits will probably be meaningful to Tony in ways Steve has never been good at understanding, but has always been capable of appreciating.

“Hey. You still elbow deep in motor oil?”

“Did your invitation have a typo or something? Party’s still an hour away.”

“No typos. Just…”

Twitchy. Excited. Happy. Nervous.

Steve conveys all that in a shy smile. He blushes a little, too, and being aware of that—of how easy he can be to read, of how his skin sometimes betrays him—makes him blush even more.

He scratches the nape of his neck.

Tony looks at him, smiles back, and Steve knows he doesn’t need to explain anything.

“So,” he says instead, a laugh brewing in his chest, “thirty-five, huh?”

Tony smirks. “You know that’s not the right number.”

“Was just trying to be kind. No one needs to know you’re forty-six.”

The smirk turns into a laugh. A spark appears behind Tony’s eyes. He places the wrench on the table and gets up from his workbench to walk towards Steve. Slowly. One step at a time. “Wrong again,” he says.

“Thirty-nine.”

“Nah.”

Step.

“Forty-two.”

“Cold.”

Step.

“Thirty-seven.”

“Umpf.”

Step, step, step.

Tony is sensual when he walks like this, when he lets his hips roll with each movement. He can turn it off and on as he likes; Steve has seen him do it many times. So he knows that this time, like every other, is deliberate.

It’s scary how sexy Tony can be even when he’s wearing a dirty tank top, even with streaks of grease on his face. Even smelling like sweat.

When Tony’s right in front of him, Steve can’t resist the urge to touch him. He places his hands on Tony’s hips and leans forward, a smile still dancing on his lips. He closes his eyes and breathes Tony in, his skin as familiar as Steve’s own.

Tony grows rigid against Steve.

“We said— _you_ said—never again. After the last time.”

Steve lets his head drop and sighs. He feels Tony’s body slip away from between his hands.

“Can we just—”

“It’s been a tough year, but surely you can’t be _this_ lonely—”

It’s the wrong thing to say. But Steve says it nonetheless. “Maybe I am.”

Tony stares at him for a moment that tastes like a lifetime of mistakes. His face, mostly composed and serious, still goes through a sequence of microexpressions that tell Steve more than he’d like to know about the way Tony feels about him.

In the end, there’s a sort of tiredness around Tony’s eyes, an awareness, resignation. He visibly pushes it all down and plasters the sensual smirk from before onto his face.

Steve kisses it off his lips.

“We don’t have time for this,” Tony says while they fall to the floor in a heap of limbs and disturbingly annoying clothes.

“We do,” Steve protests, and the front of Tony’s jeans falls apart between his fingers. “Sorry,” he says, and Tony looks almost offended by that. That Steve isn’t just ripping everything away, making this quick and efficient and not allowing Tony too much time to think about it. About the consequences, about what this _means_.

Tony is naked in moments, his skin tanned but still flushed with arousal, muscles taut and sinewy in this dark corner of the lab.

The floor is hard underneath Steve’s back. Hard and cold and not exactly spotlessly clean and Steve doesn’t want to be anywhere else.

Tony tugs Steve’s pants down just enough for his cock to spring free from his underwear. He’s so hard he can barely think, and when Tony swallows him down with that warm and perfect mouth of his, Steve blacks out with how sharp the pleasure is.

He pushes a hand in Tony’s hair and wishes he had Tony’s dick in his mouth, that he had something to do except feeling every single thing Tony is doing to him.

Tony seems to read his mind. Tony always seems to read his mind, except when he doesn’t, and they crash and burn and explode and bring the whole world down with them.

Tony gets up and rearranges their positions. He kneels behind Steve’s head and reaches back up Steve’s body, towards his cock. In a flurry of skin and harsh breaths Steve suddenly finds Tony’s dick pushing past his lips, while Tony’s mouth is around him again a second later.

 _Shit_ , he’d say if he could talk.

Tony’s expert and sure of himself, and this isn’t Steve’s first rodeo either, but in the beginning it feels weird that he’s not really bobbing his head or even sucking or anything, he’s just swallowing around Tony’s cock over and over, saliva dribbling out of the corner of his mouth while he presses his nose into Tony’s pubic hair and there’s nothing else, nothing else at all, there’s just—

He’s choking on it and he doesn’t care, he just wants this, all of this, all of Tony—him doing all the work and fucking into Steve’s mouth from above him, pressing the tip of a spit-slick finger into Steve and—

Fuck, fuck—

He comes in Tony’s mouth and Tony comes in his at the same time, and Steve lets his throat work so he doesn’t waste a drop of what he’s given. But then he feels only air around himself while Tony slips out of him quietly, and all of a sudden hopelessness blossoms in the middle of Steve’s chest, and he almost thinks that he could cry.

This isn’t what he wanted to do. He didn’t have this in mind. He was supposed to say… He had a present, and—

They push themselves up on their feet.

Tony’s shoulders sag in defeat while he’s touching his dick as though there’s something wrong with it. There’s blood on his fingers.

“You okay?” Steve asks, worried.

“I think…” Tony laughs, “I think my frenulum just broke. This body is kinda new. In some way.”

“New?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Is it… Does it hurt?”

“Uh… kinda. A bit.” Tony looks at his watch—the only thing he’s wearing. “Damn. I still have to shower,” he says, his arm moving in a wide gesture towards the bathroom door.

Steve catches Tony’s wrist in his hand and guides it to his own waist in a forced embrace Tony is only half-resisting. He just says, “Careful,” so Steve doesn’t get Tony’s blood on his t-shirt. Steve brushes his palm up along Tony’s neck and kisses him.

It’s quick—Tony pulls away after only a handful of seconds. He bows his head and rests his forehead on Steve’s shoulder. Steve hears him take a deep breath, and the scent of Steve’s leather jacket must wrap around Tony’s heart and squeeze down on it because the next thing he does…

“Kiss me again,” he says, voice rough and urgent, his lips scratching against Steve’s jaw while he lifts his head.

Steve pulls him closer. He presses their bodies together and loses himself into the clear blue of Tony’s eyes.

Tony’s lips still taste like Steve’s orgasm.

***

Tony comes out of the bathroom still in a daze, weirdly surprised to find out that his shower didn’t make what just happened between Steve and him any less real.

But it’s real; it happened. There’s still a scratch in his throat. His dick, disinfected and bandaged now, still gives him a twinge of pain now and then. It makes him laugh, again. He feels strangely young.

Steve is waiting for him, patiently leaning back against a table, arms crossed over his chest and face pensive, his hair falling over his forehead and catching the light just right.

Tony tosses him a clean t-shirt, and Steve wears it quickly with a nod of thanks.

“So. That was… that was nice,” Tony tries for casual and fails so miserably that he wants to bang his head against the wall, but he just rebooted his entire biology so he’s kind of trying to take better care of himself.

Steve is very still for endlessly long seconds, paralyzed by stunned disbelief. “You’re not gonna do this, Tony.”

“Do what?”

“This. Act like you’re stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“Didn’t say you actually were.”

Tony’s about to reply, but the words die on his lips. There’s no point in this banter. It’s not playful, it’s just confrontational and self-destructive and he doesn’t want to do that anymore. He doesn’t want to fight his friends anymore.

Steve extracts something from the pocket of his jacket. It’s a small box, blue velvet. He holds it out for Tony to take.

It’s a piece of the golden mesh Tony used for the arms and legs of his armor, years ago. All the way back to the beginning of the Avengers. To the beginning of everything.

“Steve…”

“Something ripped this away during battle. I don’t remember what it was. I saw it on the pavement and picked it up. I didn’t even know who Iron Man was, back then.”

Tony smiles, bittersweet, encouraging Steve to continue.

“I took off my glove and touched it and I thought… It’s stupid, I know, but I thought that thing had been against your skin, and touching it with my fingers felt like… like…”

Steve looks at him, as if he’s expecting help from Tony, as if Tony can finish his sentence for him.

“I thought I’d never get anything more. Not from Iron Man. And it was confusing as hell, because meanwhile I was developing a pretty embarrassing crush on Tony Stark.” Steve forces a smile and then swallows back something that can only be nostalgia. “Anyway. I was in love with Iron Man. And I thought that piece of mesh would be all I’d ever have of him. So I kept it.”

The admission feels awfully big for some reason. It makes no sense. Tony already knew this. He was there for all of it, the other half of this huge mess that is their relationship.

But then, he knows. The _word._ They never said the word. The whole point was that they would never say that word.

Tony didn’t already know this. Tony had no idea Steve felt like this.

But Tony, Tony _was_ in love with Steve; he’d always been in love with Steve.

Knowing his own feelings doesn’t mean Tony knew Steve’s. But maybe, over the years, through death and loss and coming back to life and the end of the world… maybe, at some point, they got so wrapped up around each other that they lost the thread of themselves, and they don’t know anymore where one ends and the other starts.

It does make sense, now, in Tony’s mind.

“But… why are you giving it to me now?” Tony asks, still staring at the piece of mesh in the box.

Steve sighs. “I want to do it right this time, Tony.”

Right?

Oh, well. Sure.

“It hasn’t always been perfect, especially lately. I’ll give you that. But we’ve done it right once or twice, I think.” He chances a quick glance at Steve’s face. “There are some good memories, right?” Tony feels his throat constricting.

Steve looks down. “I didn’t mean the team,” he says, calm and quiet.

Oh.

_Oh._

“You can’t… you can’t be serious.”

Tony’s head spins with disbelief.

“I thought about it. Been thinking about it for a while, actually.”

Tony closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose to refocus. This is unreal, this is just—

“I want to try again. I want to try for real this time.”

Steve’s eagerness quiets Tony’s mind, but his voice is still unsteady when he asks, “How do you mean, for real?”

“I want… I’d like… Dammit.” Tony doesn’t move, doesn’t try to say anything. That’s what gives Steve courage to keep talking. “A relationship, Tony. A real one. That’s what I’m trying to—”

“Has it been fake, all these years?”

“It wasn’t. Don’t be unfair. You know what I mean.”

Tony looks down at his feet and nods. No more secrets. No more fumbling in some dark room in the dead of night. No more pretending, no more telling everyone they’re just friends. Tony has always been worse than Steve at hiding it, anyway.

No more not defining whatever was between them. No more avoiding words.

They’ve done it for years. It’s all they’ve ever done. On and off, on and off. Off and on again. Off every time the world was ending and they were at opposites sides of it. On every time they started a new team with renewed hope that this time, _this time_ , they wouldn’t fuck it up all over again.

But they never gave it a name. They never admitted it to anyone, least of all to each other. It was just something that happened, lasted for a few months, sometimes even a year, and then—

“Everything that’s happened, Tony, to me, to you—it made me think. Really think. About who I am. And what I really want. How I really want to spend my life and…”

“You said _never_ again.”

“I know what I said. Is it really so impossible to believe that I’ve changed my mind?”

There’s silence for just a moment, and then Tony huffs out a small laugh.

Steve smiles too, but his voice comes out in a little more than a whisper. “It’s always been you, Tony. At the center of it all. There’s always been you.”

Maybe Steve’s right. Maybe what counts the most about this isn’t that they always fall apart for one reason or another, but that no matter what they always end up back together.

Tony draws closer to Steve, makes him uncross his arms and slides into a tense hug.

“Why did you give me the piece of mesh, Steve?”

“‘Cause I figured… if I get to keep you I won’t need to hold onto it anymore.”

Tony hears MJ greet the first guests upstairs. They have to go.

“You really had to ruin my fortieth birthday, huh?”

Steve laughs. “That’s not the right number either. And the only thing that got ruined so far is my shirt.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

“Let’s,” Steve says, and Tony kisses him again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is part of this quote from Charlotte Brontë's _Jane Eyre_ : “I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
> 
> On [Tumblr](http://silkspectred.tumblr.com/post/174501011395/pass-through-life-at-my-side-silkspectred-25k)  
> On [Twitter](https://twitter.com/starkspectre/status/1002938536826417152)


End file.
